larkfofty

This is great. As someone who was recently diagnosed with cancer, I've found myself quite interested in furthering my knowledge on the topic.

For someone interested in the field with only a computer science background, are there any jobs in the field that could reasonably be transitioned into without any formal biology education?

Technically yes, but sadly in practice rarely enforced. Stand on a street corner in NYC for five minutes and you will see dozens of traffic violations that go unenforced. I don't agree with it, but there is a certain amount of accepted lawlessness here when it comes to driving.

I've actually really been of two minds about this since leaving AWS, though it's been a few years. On one hand, I remember spending an absurd amount of time debugging esoteric internal tooling errors that were un-googleable. The cases where you were lucky enough to find someone else who had the same issue on the internal stack-overflow or wiki were the good ones.

On the other hand, I've actually found myself missing features from amazon internal tools at the jobs I've had since. One example: I remember a pipelines feature where you could look at any change and quickly tell exactly how far that change had made it in your pipeline. At my current job, determining exactly when change X deployed to region Y has been a multi-step exercise in manually comparing commit hashes.

I'm an ex-Amazon software engineer who worked in AWS for a couple years and pretty much everything in this article and comments rings true to me and lines up with my personal experience. I won't say much about the PIPs and the brutal oncall rotations because that has been written about enough already, but I do want to express that working at Amazon was devastating for my mental health.

I was more stressed than I have ever been in my life. I had to start seeing a therapist specifically to help me with the constant anxiety I had about my job. I had to see a doctor to get anti-anxiety medication. I tried all the things people suggest: diet, exercise, therapy, medication, meditation, nothing was helping with the escalating stress and anxiety I had about the job. After a lot of internal debate I quit with nothing else lined up. I just needed to get out.

I took a 30% pay cut to join a new company and I couldn't be happier. Sure every job has its occasional stresses and pain points, and this one is no different, but I'm learning that constant stress and anxiety about your job is not normal and at least for me not worth the money.

I still have a small heart attack every time I hear someone's ringtone go off which is the same ringtone I had set on pong paging.

I'm actually surprised this doesn't happen with wireless microphones more often. While the industry is slowly moving towards digital transmitters, many broadway shows still use old body pack analog transmitters on their actors. Since these shows are stationary they are likely using the same frequencies for each transmitter every night.

I can't imagine it would be too hard to figure out some of these frequencies and transmit over them into the PA. There is a pilot tone but I don't think it'd be difficult to spoof.

I used to work in a shop that rented out audio equipment to broadway shows.

I was given an offer from Amazon with a BA in a completely unrelated field. They never even asked about my education. This was for a Front End Engineer role though, not sure if that makes a difference.